


Here's fire, Now

by rironomind



Category: Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
Genre: Arson, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Other, Pyromania, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-09-28 13:46:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20426960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rironomind/pseuds/rironomind
Summary: If the devil takes your soul and drives you to the pyre, it's only fair you return the favour.





	Here's fire, Now

**Author's Note:**

> An old piece of work I thought I should put up since I read the play and had some thoughts.

Maybe the devil exists, maybe you have summoned him, maybe he pulls on a skin you hate. Tell him to change it, get angry when he disobeys. Maybe you scream, “Why! Villain! I gave you my soul!”

Maybe he says, “Here’s fire,” and hands you an unlit match. Maybe you take it.

\--

You have painted a target on someone without either him or you knowing it. He lives complacently, one foot in front of the other, mouth open and shut. He laughs freely. You are in the background, a wet cigarette, a rusted tap, a shrinking puddle of water in the afternoon sun.

You have painted a target on someone and perdition take you because you have damned him and both of you don’t know it. It’s too late though. His image has been burned into your brain. The sound of a memory forms soft and sudden, like lighting a match.

\--

He doesn’t so much haunt your dreams as live in them. He lounges on an armchair in the corner of your mind. He smokes disgusting cigarettes and fills your brain with thoughts of nicotine and ashes. “Here’s fire,” he says, one hand outstretched. “Now.”

You wake up, he’s not there. Not that that's new. Why would he be? Why would he be handing you a box of matches? Why would he snatch away the sheath with the sulphur strip? Yet the afterimage is burned into the inside of your eyelids.

You get up and go through the rigmarole of becoming human again. Rouse yourself with a steaming cup of instant coffee, scrape the sands of sleep from your eyes and climb into your skin. It’s cold outside. You get onto your bike, you think you smell burning rubber. 

\--

Pretend the summoning circle has been rubbed out, the runes no longer visible, the chanting has stopped. The devil is still standing atop the pyre you built out of memories and love. Or maybe hate. His armchair lodged painfully into the side of the pyre like a splinter, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

He grins all sharp and deadly and you fumble for the match.

\--

Someone once told you that your heart was a block of ice. The emotions, like air bubbles, preserved in tiny empty spheres. That same person handed you an unlit match, said, “Here’s fire.”

But whatever it was, fire, emotions, the rush of heat started at your feet and went straight to your head. It didn’t touch your heart.

“Hello,” you say to the person across the table. A person you’re on a date with. No name, just, your date. “Hello, there’s a burning in my skull and an iceberg in my chest. Please love me, please take care of me, please give me everything.” They give you the bill, they give you bruises, they give you a broken heart and then leave. Somewhere in the world, someone laughs, stretches out his hands, doesn’t mind the burn.

\--

Your mind decays and as it does so, your soul blackens. You have terrible nightmares about teddy bears and balloons. The devil is standing in the middle of a carnival eating cotton candy. He makes a face you recognise.

The face is Not Very Nice.

That’s all before he sets the carnival alight and a hypnic jerk wakes you. It was his hand on your cheek, leaving a trail of black soot, the carnival blazing behind you in bright colours.

\--

You stumble into wakefulness. When you walk down the street the pavement falls out from beneath you, a solid black mass rises up instead. The stench is like the slow simmering of acrid liquids, maybe vomit.

You see someone you recognise standing across the street. “Hello,” you call out.

The person turns their face towards you, half their face is burnt off, “Hello,” it croaks back. The word struggles out of its mouth, creaking and crumbling apart. Something is wrong about its tone, it’s not replying you, it’s simply repeating what you said like a monstrous parrot. “Hello.” It says again, this time louder, more startled, more filled with a kind of darkness that edges into your bones. “Hello.” It screeches, lunging across the road towards you. As it bounds towards you an eyeball slips out of its face, charred and wrinkled. A double-decker bus crushes the creature under its wheels.

You forget its face, you forget its voice.

You walk home.

\--

In your dreams, the devil’s features gradually contort. His right eye slowly swells, his teeth shrinking within his stretched lips, his nose pointing one way and his chin another, like a Picasso rendered in 3D. His hand, a distorted ball of flesh, hands you a match. “Here.”

The word twists in the air and turns into ‘Hello’.

\--

You climb up the clock tower and look down at the smokestacks rising over the buildings. The city lies like an indomitable giant smoking cigarettes from every orifice. A memory flutters into your brain and then disappears in a snap of fingers, in a puff of smoke.

He leans over your shoulder, his one remaining eye lolling loosely, and leers at you. He drags a match out of thin air and holds it towards you. Grins.

You watch the smoke rise to engulf you.

\--

“Hello,” you say to him, across the dinner table. He starts, confused, and rightly so. Another him is sitting right on top of him, super-imposed and overlayed onto his skin like a bad X-ray. You lean forward slowly. He flinches. The second him grins. There is a match between his teeth. The sharp smell of kerosene blooms all around you.

“You asked for my soul and I gave it, but here’s what we really want,” you say, plucking the match out. "All the same, to burn. I just thought it was only fair. Better the devil you know, right?"

"I don't know," the more evil of the two says. "What the hell is going on, John?"

"Exactly." The lit match falls from your hand. You close your eyes serenely and count, “I, 2-”


End file.
